Advise and Consent (68 page)

As he reached his office the thought occurred to him that even though Bob had seemed to recommend against it, it might be helpful all around to let the President know directly that he was still standing loyally by their agreement, and to tell him, also, that he wasn’t letting himself be upset by the press reports—that, in short, he believed in him. Certainly that couldn’t do any harm, and it might make the President feel better. But when he called the White House he was told the President was busy and so had to be content with a promise by his assistant that he would return the call later in the afternoon when he was free.

For approximately two hours after that he was busy in his office attending to the business of the constituency, answering letters, checking various projects with departments downtown, studying up on hearings and upcoming legislation, gradually relaxing from the worry he had felt about Bob as the result of their uneasy talk. Orrin called once, to say that he was sure his own skepticism earlier was probably unwarranted, and to offer the reassurance that all was well, something Brig knew he really didn’t mean, but he was amused and touched by the consideration. The proprietor of
Meet the Press
called and asked him to appear on Sunday afternoon, and after a moment’s thought he agreed, for surely everything would be in the clear by then. Lafe called twice, once to say much the same thing Orrin had, and once to repeat a joke he thought Brig might feel like laughing at; he did, and appreciated not only the joke but the friendship and concern behind it. Somewhere around three, struck by a sudden thought, he tried to reach Tommy Davis and kid him out of whatever had been troubling him last night, but the Justice’s secretary, after an awkward hesitation, said he wasn’t in. The President, apparently swamped with work, which was certainly understandable, had not called by four thirty, when the AP did.

“Senator,” he said, “our White House man has just phoned me about the briefing they had down there at four. Somebody asked Pete whether the President was withdrawing the nomination and his answer was, ‘No comment.’ This has aroused a lot of speculation, as you can imagine, and I was wondering if you cared to comment yourself?”

“No, I don’t see why I should,” Brig said with a laugh. “If ‘no comment’ is good enough for Pete, it’s good enough for me.” Then just to make conver-sation and keep his refusal from sounding too ungracious, he asked, “Was that all they talked about at the briefing or was there some real news out of it?”

“Nothing much,” AP said. “A few appointments, tomorrow’s schedule, the usual odds and ends. Some assistant secretary has gone overseas on a special mission for the President—Commerce, I think—and they’re still trying to firm up a date for the Queen to come over in the fall. It was pretty routine stuff, on the whole. We can’t get anything out of you on the nomination, then?”

“That’s right,” Brigham Anderson said slowly in a voice his listener thought was suddenly quite peculiar, “you can’t.”

But even then, for he was a reliable young man who kept his promises, it did not really occur to him to believe that the President was not keeping his. There was a momentary shock, true enough, but it was swiftly succeeded by the reflection that after all, it might be entirely logical for James Morton to be sent away if the nomination were to be withdrawn, perhaps much more logical than that he should stay in Washington, a potential time bomb who might, under the impetus of emotion and the excitement of swiftly moving events, go off in some fashion that would reveal to the press that there was much more to the President’s decision than met the eye. It was only when he tried to reach the Majority Leader again for confirmation of this assumption, and was told by Mary in what he could sense was a lie she did not enjoy that he was not in, that he began to feel an increasing uneasiness. Casting about for some way to alleviate it, he thought of calling Harley, and did so; but the Vice President wasn’t any better informed than he was.

“I think you’re entirely right in the way you’ve assessed it, Brig,” he said, “and I could try to call him and confirm it for you if you want, but you know how it is. You could probably get through to him just as fast as I could, in spite of all that buddy-buddy talk last night.”

“There
was
quite a lot of talk last night, wasn’t there?” Senator Anderson observed somewhat ruefully. “I’m glad to hear you weren’t taken in by it.”

“Oh, he’s charming, all right,” the Vice President said, “and I still feel he was sincere about it. But you know how he is. You have to be careful.”

“Yes,” Brig said, “you have to be careful. Well, thank you, Harley. I guess there wouldn’t be much point in trying to call him again.”

“I’m sure everything is all right,” the Vice President said. “He’s just working it out in his own way.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Brig said with an irony that was not lost on Harley, who became very fatherly and told him to stop worrying, everything would be fine.

“I wish I could think so,” Brig said, sounding young and uncertain again, “but now I’m not entirely sure.”

“I tell you what, Brigham,” Harley said then. “If you feel by tomorrow that something has gone wrong and it isn’t going the way we were given to understand, you call me and we’ll get in the press and tell them the full story together.”

The magnitude of this offer, with all its enormous political connotations and implications, left the Senator from Utah speechless for a moment. He spoke finally in a tone of deep gratitude.

“That’s wonderful of you, Harley,” he said, “but I couldn’t ask you to do that. He would never forgive you.”

“I don’t care,” the Vice President said, and he sounded as though he meant it, as though last night had been for him too a fundamental turning point of some sort. “I have a hunch I may be President myself before long. And even if I’m not, what can he do to me, anyway?”

“Well, I really do appreciate it, Harley,” Senator Anderson said. “But we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

“I mean it,” Harley said. “Don’t get to feeling you don’t have friends, because you do.”

“Thanks, Harley,” Brig said, touched by his tone. “That’s very kind.”

After he had hung up, however, kindness suddenly did not seem to be enough. There had been too many strange happenings during the day, too many odd little things, not big and dramatic but just sufficiently out of focus so that the sum total was somehow very disturbing. It was strange, he thought, the way the two days shaped up. Yesterday had begun as a day of imagined shadows and had ended at midnight in the sunlight, figuratively speaking, of victory. Today had begun in sunlight and was ending with shadows; and in some intangible, ominous way he was beginning to feel, as he concluded work for the day and left the office shortly after 6 p.m. that this time the shadows were real.

It was not until he reached home, however, that he realized how real. And then it was not until after he had been home for some time, for although he could sense at once that Mabel was under strain of some sort, he did not for some hours associate it directly with himself. Partly this was because his wife, by an effort whose magnitude he only understood later, managed to maintain a relatively calm outward aspect, and partly it was because the early part of the evening was dominated, as always by his daughter. Dinner was a pitched battle, for some one of those mysterious reasons unclear to parents, and he got all his own stubbornness thrown back at him in a way that was, characteristically, both charming and infuriating. At the end of it she suddenly climbed into his lap, threw her arms around his neck and said, “I forgive you, Daddy,” in a tone of such gracious tolerance that he burst out laughing, and her mother taken out of her own preoccupations for a moment, laughed, too.

“You’ve been naughty, so
you’re
forgiving
me,
” he said. “Well, Pidge, I think that’s very kind of you.”

“You like me, don’t you, Daddy?” she inquired happily as he tossed her onto his shoulder and started up the stairs toward bath and bed.

“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I do.”

“That’s nice,” she said comfortably. Halfway up, he paused and turned back.

“Coming, Mommy?” he asked, and Mabel smiled in a forced way that told him that whatever he had to face when he came down again would not be pleasant.

“I’ll wait here,” she said. Then she added with a sudden open urgency that disturbed him deeply, “Don’t be too long.”

“Well hurry it up,” he promised. “I’ll pop Pidge in and then I’ll be down.”

“Pop Pidge in,” his daughter repeated, for the words had a satisfying sound. “Pop! Pidge! In!”

As he came back down, leaving her rosy and angelic, playing thoughtfully in bed with Pooh and Piglet, he was suddenly conscious that the house was very still. Through the open windows the last of the light was dying out; a power mower was going somewhere; kids shouted, a car passed in the quiet street. Peace lay on the world, except, he sensed, in his own house. He sighed and went into the living room, where he found Mabel with the television on, just loud enough so they could talk over it and still not have their voices heard beyond the room.

“Well,” he said pleasantly, “have you had a good day?”

“Oh, pretty good,” she said, with a small attempt at politeness to match his.

“What did you do?” he asked, picking up the
Star
and surveying its last-edition headlines: NOMINATION REMAINS MYSTERY; and, TRACKERS LOSE SOVIET SPACE SIGNALS. “Go over to Knoxes?”

“We went shopping with Beth this morning,” she said, “but we’ve been home all afternoon.”

“Did Pidge take her nap?” he said. “She seemed awfully lively tonight.”

“She got about half an hour, I think,” Mabel said, smiling faintly. “Then she decided that was enough.”

“Just like her father,” he said with a mock wryness. “Headstrong.”

“Yes,” she said, and a little silence developed and grew while he looked thoughtfully at the paper.

“Did I leave my slippers down here?” he asked finally, and she got up promptly, went to the hall closet, brought them back, and dropped them by his feet.

“Thanks,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, and he became conscious that she was still standing close beside him. He took her hand and smiled up reassuringly.

“What’s the matter?” he asked humorously. “What have I done this time?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her hand away and looking as though she might cry. “I just don’t know.”

“Well,” he said, “I certainly won’t know either unless you tell me. What is it?”

“Some man called here a little while before you got home,” she said, going back to her chair across the room.

“Who?” he asked. She shook her head with a strained, worried expression.

“He didn’t say,” she said.

“An anonymous caller,” he said with a little flare of angry contempt for whoever it was. “That’s always pleasant for a public man’s family. Did he threaten you or Pidge?”

“No, it wasn’t that,” she said, and just then the television blurred and she went to adjust it.

“What did he want, then?” he asked, putting down the paper and reaching for the slippers.

“He didn’t say,” she said in the same worried tone.

“Well, what
did
he say?” he asked with some impatience, and if her answer struck him like a physical blow it was not surprising, for nothing at all could have prepared him for it.

“He said to ask you about what you did in Honolulu,” she said.

For a second he had a horrible falling feeling as though he were spinning down and down into a fearful vortex with no way to stop. But by a great effort of will he managed to hold the universe still long enough to say with a fairly successful attempt at a laugh, “I haven’t been in Honolulu since the war.”

“That’s what he said,” Mabel told him. “Ask him what he did in Honolulu in the war.”

“Well,” he said, and he bent down to take off his shoes very carefully and deliberately, as though the exactitude with which he untied a shoestring might somehow put the world back together again, “I rested. I swam. I went surf riding. And I ate a lot. Did I ever tell you I put on ten pounds in that rest period?”

“Did you?” Mabel asked, and something about her tone made him look up with an odd, haggard expression on his face.

“Don’t you believe me?” he asked, and he could see through a sort of gray cloud that was beginning to settle over everything that this was the wrong thing to say, that it was too defensive and would only make her worry more. But he was so completely shattered, as whoever had attacked him with vicious cruelty through his wife had evidently calculated he would be, that all the self-control of a lifetime was temporarily in ruins.

“I don’t know,” she said at last, sounding lost and afraid. “He sounded so—odd, as though he knew a secret”—she gave a little shudder “—a dirty secret. Who was it? What did he want? What did he mean by it? Why won’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” he said desperately, as though reiteration would make it true. “I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the nomination. I don’t know.”

“But I thought the nomination was all settled,” she said in a voice that was half cry.

“I don’t know,” he repeated dully. “Maybe it isn’t.” He looked up with a stricken expression she had never seen.

“Please,” he said beseechingly, as though he were three years old and the sky had fallen in. “Please.” For now the day made sense.

But this change, so abrupt, so uncharacteristic, so utterly unexpected in one who had always seemed so strong and above any real need for her, so terrified her that she could hardly speak; and so instead of realizing that this was the moment to go to him, to accept and not ask questions, to give him the strength he had never asked from her but desperately needed now, and that if she did they might weather whatever it was and he would be hers forever, she gave a sudden cry and ran from the room.

How long he sat there alone he did not know, except that he knew out of some deep well of pain that it was a period in which he seemed to draw away irrevocably from humankind. Mabel he felt had abandoned him; Orrin and his other friends never even crossed his mind, so great was his inward agony. There was no one for him, he kept repeating to himself as he mechanically finished putting on his slippers and tried without success to turn back to the blur of newsprint that used to be the evening paper; no one.